A Christian Looks to the Bible
for Guidance on Abortion
R. H. Allen
Published by Murder Creek Publishing at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 R. H. Allen
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As Christians we all consider ourselves searchers for the truth. Sometimes that search will take us to a few of the more obscure corners of the scriptures, or the same search might cause us to reexamine a familiar passage that we have always assumed had a specific meaning. If we stop to look at well known passages in context and try to find other passages that address the situation we are trying to learn more about, we occasionally find better insight into the true meaning of the passage we are researching.
One key to finding a better understanding of what the truth is, surrounding a particular issue, is to have an open mind. I often use a simple exercise with large classes to illustrate the fact that we don’t always understand what we read, because we tend to read what we think the passage says instead of what it really says. This can be due a variety of factors including: educational level, cultural background, religious training, and social mores that existed when we were developing our values structure.
In this exercise, I hand out small slips of paper, with the printing turned down, to all participants. They are told to leave the papers face down until I tell them to turn the papers over. I then ask them to turn the papers over, read them, then return the papers to the table face down. They are then told to count the number of “t”s, “f”s, or whatever letter I have used sparingly in the printed material, when I tell them to turn the papers over again. I give them ten seconds to read the papers and count the “t”s. Then the papers are returned to the table top, face down. I then ask for how many “t”s were found. The numbers will vary widely, but seldom has anyone found the actual number of “t”s. Some of the participants start to think that their papers have different information from the others. We often want to find an external reason why we don’t see the same things others do, when we’re looking at the same information/situation/question.
I assure them that all the papers are the same, and we go through another ten second review of the printed statement. Papers are turned over, and the participants are surveyed again to see how many “t”s they think are on the paper. This continues until someone actually finds all the “t”s. We then all turn over our papers and let the “winner” point out the “t”s they have found. You can see the light bulbs start to come on around the room. After everyone finally sees all the “t”s, we discuss why they didn’t see all the “t”s to start with.
We conclude that most of the hard-to-find “t”s were in small words like “at,” “it,” and “to.” These are words that we have been taught have no significance. They’re essentially “throw away” words that don’t usually contain information, so we overlook them. Eventually, we get to the point where we don’t even see them when we read a paragraph. Does that mean these words are not important? Of course not. It just means that we can train ourselves to overlook words and information if we have been taught (or have decided for ourselves) that they contain no useful information for us.
One of the lessons we learn from this exercise, is that we all have biases. There are certain bits of information we simply look over or dismiss because we don’t think they have any useful meaning for us.
Another lesson we learn is that these biases are different in different people. There was a distinct difference in the number of readings that it took for different people to find all the “t”s. Even when it started to become obvious that there was a pattern unfolding, it still took longer for some people to apply their newly discovered knowledge than it did for some others.
How does that apply to our Biblical studies? Well, we are all a combination of truths and values we learned from the time we were children, until now. Some of our “truths” we learned in Sunday School, some we’ve have recently acquired through study and discussion with knowledgable Bible scholars. Many are acquired from sermons we hear or printed material that our denominations or religious groups publish.
Whenever we are faced with an ethical or moral question, we need to be aware of what our beliefs are and where they came from. This doesn’t mean the truths we learned as children aren’t correct, it just means that our ability to understand complex concepts are limited when we’re children. Therefore, a some of the basics we were given, were expressed in terms we, as children could understand. That’s not unusual. Sometimes God does the same thing with us as adults. For example, we find references to “streets of gold” in Heaven. Are they really streets of gold, or does our limited understanding keep us from really knowing what their actual constituency is? Many theologians think that these passages can’t be taken literally, but that they are expressing a material that is rare and exquisite. The streets may be made of a marvelous material that humans have never seen or experienced, so if God told us the streets would be made of “honoranthium” we would have no idea what they would be like. But we are familiar with gold and we understand that the streets of Heaven will indeed be something special to behold.
That’s the way we have to teach our children. They need simple concepts, so we often do the best we can to explain complicated issues using terms they can readily understand. That usually means a short, black and white, statement, followed by a more sophisticated explanation when they get old enough to understand. Therefore, “Thou shalt not kill,” eventually evolves into long, detailed discussions about what that really means in our everyday lives (e.g., Is killing during the conduct of a war, murder? Is capital punishment murder? Is killing someone in self-defense, murder? Etc.). So, sometimes we find ourselves working with some of the simple, basic concepts we learned in our formative years, when we should have examined those tenents more carefully and developed a working definition that is more appropriate for an adult than a child.
God himself used this approach with Israel. The ten commandments were short, and to the point. On the surface they were easy to understand. However, God added a great body of written laws that made sure the Israelites understood how to apply His ten basic principles to all aspects of their lives. If they had tried to go forward without this additional divine insight, they could easily have come up with a set of rules and regulations to implement the Commandments that missed the point of God’s message entirely.
So, in order to explore an offshoot of one of these Commandements (i.e., “Thou shalt not kill.”) let’s go to Exodus 21:22.
KJV Ex 21:22-25 If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
Here we see a situation of two men struggling and accidentally injuring a pregnant woman in the process. The scripture directs that if the fetus is aborted as a result of the injury, the offending man must pay retribution as determined by the woman’s husband.
However, if the woman herself dies, then the man must die (i.e., “give life for life”). Obviously, the Jewish Law treated the death of a fetus and the death of an actual living and breathing person differently. If the fetus had the same rights as the woman and was considered a separate life and entity of its own, the punishment for the fetus’ loss and the punishment for the loss of the woman’s life would have been the same. It wasn’t, so we see that - although a fetus was valued and important to the parents (i.e., its loss was required to be compensated by the harming party) - it was not given the same status as a person who was alive on his/her own, without the need for the mother’s body to provide it food, oxygen, and other important nutrients and growth-related products through the umbilical cord.
The lesson we get from this, is that as long as the fetus is in the womb, it is not considered a viable entity on its on, and treated by God’s law as a living person. No matter how man tries to define the beginning of life, if his definition gives a fetus “life” or individual “rights” (reserved for those entities who are alive) before it’s exit from the womb then he is trying to rescind the principle we see clearly stated in God’s Law, as given to Israel in Ex 21:21-25.
The debate over when life starts is a popular exercise in religious and political circles these days. Generally, you can see that various factions have “reverse engineered” their stands on the issue. In other words, they have started with the idea that best meets their own agenda, and have developed arguments to support their stands. This is not unusual, because if our objective is to win an argument, then reverse engineering our “logic” is a good way to do it. However, if our goal is to actually discover the biblical truth about an issue, then we let our research take us where the Bible leads us. Sometimes we discover things we had never noticed before. This can be rewarding, but it can also be disconcerting, if the information we have found doesn’t match the things we thought we knew about a subject.
Unfortunately, it’s usually the individuals on the extreme ends of the “Right to Life”/”Right to Chose” debate who get the majority of the limelight. Although there are probably a few people who believe that abortion is nothing more than another means of birth control, most of the Pro Choice people I know have a great respect for the unborn. Many would not personally chose to have an abortion, except under extreme medical conditions, but they wish to preserve the right of a woman to choose an abortion if she feels that is the best solution to a difficult problem. Most Pro Choicer’s believe that the decision to have an abortion is a private matter that must be worked out by an individual, based upon her situation, circumstances, moral values, and the religious values she holds. All these factors vary from person to person, and after all, it is the individual woman who must live with her decision. No matter how we might disagree with her decision, she is the one who has to live with it the rest of her life.
She also has to live with the decision to bear a fetus full-term, as well. Sometimes the decision she has to make is to weigh the benefits of bringing a child into a household of abuse, poverty, neglect, drug addiction, or delivering a child with potentially grave health problems; against the regret she might have over terminating the pregnancy. The termination of a pregnancy is a single event. Abuse and poverty are multiple events that happen every day and every night of a child’s life ands follows it through puberty into adulthood.
We often look at the inhabitants of Masada and wonder at the strength of character it took for the men to kill their own wives and children rather than let them fall into the hands of the besieging Roman army. Our awe is based upon the depth of love that a father and husband had to have in order to bear the pain and emotional devastation they must have borne, when they killed their families quickly and humanely instead of leaving them for the abuse and torture they would undoubtedly suffered from the invading Roman soldiers. Imagine a troubled and abused woman who decides to terminate a pregnancy rather than bring a child into a house that is already filled with addiction and abuse; where the child could look forward to poverty, hunger, and physical and sexual abuse in its future, until it finally grew old enough to escape – often to a life on the streets. Is that woman any less admirable than one of the tortured fathers at Masada? Which would have been more merciful, leaving the women and children to be repeatedly raped and eventually killed by the Roman soldiers, or condemning a modern child to 10–15 years of hunger, degradation, physical and mental torture, and quite possibly an early death on the streets?
Obviously, not every situation is as dire as the one described above; however, a great number of them do have one or more of the characteristics noted. Who should make the decision concerning how many of the atrocities should be ignored before we reach a threshold where we might be able to see the logic, and maybe even the humanity of a woman’s choice to terminate a pregnancy?
The group we often refer to as “Pro Life” includes people with views that range from accepting abortions that are medical necessities (where the life of the baby or the mother is in danger) to some who believe that it is the potential mother’s duty to die, if necessary, to deliver the baby. Generally, the more restrictive the view, the more vocal the proponent. This happens on the Pro Choice side as well.
Certainly, the fringe Pro Life proponents would say the women portrayed above should always deliver the baby. They expect the woman to take control of her life and get out of an abusive relationship, or they trust in a Divine Being to deliver the child from its impending fate. Neither is a very reasonable or mature idea. The psychology of battered and abused women is something that we, who stand outside the edges of their cruel and unforgiving world, can not understand. We reason that we’d never put up with a situation like that, but we weren’t raised in a culture where women were regularly beaten, raped, abused, and were expected to accept it as a way of life. Children raised like that tend to grow up to be adults who accept this as “normal.” Young women expect to be bullied and beaten by their husbands, young men expect to bully and beat their wives. It’s a never-ending spiral of abuse. Quite early in life, these people give up any idea of getting into a better situation, they just steel themselves to the fact they’ll be living inside that culture until they die. As far as divine intervention goes, God is certainly capable of intervening, especially through the acts of His followers. However, if we spend all our time carrying picket signs and pursuing what are really political goals, we won’t have much time left to do his bidding for the “windows, orphans, and strangers in your land.”
There are quite a few organizations that are devoting themselves to helping pregnant women find adoptive homes for their children, if they chose to bear the child. This is a laudable ministry. What we must be careful to avoid, is to try to keep from letting our zeal to get another child for adoption, be fueled - in any way - by pride in the number of children we’ve placed or the share of the adoption fees that our agency collects. It’s so easy to slip across the line of pursuing righteous goals to simply pursuing self-perpetuating goals. We have seen several examples of world-wide ministries that have failed because the ministers took their eyes off their original righteous goals and started paying too much attention to the numbers, money, and other material resources.
Since abortions are not very common after the end of the first trimester, most of the debate has focused on the first three months of pregnancy. There is no specific Christian scripture that addresses abortion, with the exception of at least one passage in Mormon scriptures. Therefore, most of us have no Biblical exhortation that supports or opposes abortion. This puts us into quite a quandary. Many Pro Life proponents have decided to use the approach that abortion is murder. We’ve already explored that concept and have seen how Ex 21:22-25 refutes that assumption. Setting that aside momentarily, let’s follow the logic that is driving the “abortion is murder” argument. First, you can not have a murder without having a life; therefore, it is important to supporters of this premise to define “when life begins.” Since most abortions happen in the first three months of pregnancy, if you are interested in stopping all abortions, you must define the beginning of life as early as possible. You can’t get any earlier than conception, so if the majority of Americans will accept the fact that life begins at conception, and that abortion is the taking of life (and is therefore murder) then the Pro Life fringe element has pulled us all into their air tight logic that all abortions should be stopped.
This is what I referred to earlier as “reverse engineering.” The desire to make all abortions illegal, will drive you to try to define all abortions as the taking of a life (and therefore murder) and you will want to define the start of life as early as possible (i.e., at conception). Otherwise, you might be more receptive to hearing the voices of others who may have slightly different perspectives on the abortion. Right-to-chose supporters are just as adamant in their stand on abortion.
If you step away from a strict black and white understanding of abortion or right-to-chose issues, and are willing to consider the situation with a desire for the real truth, instead of pursuing a truly political agenda; you may be surprised in your eventual conclusions concerning this topic for which so many people think they have the one and only answer.
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About the author:
R. H. Allen has been a youth leader, divorce recovery counselor, and Bible Study teacher for decades. He is interested in discovering Biblical principles related to current topics and not in defending a particular political position. Look for more of his research in books and articles published through Smashwords in the future.